okay i lied. im a liar. i have one last thing to say and then im gettin back to cleaning
i have to admit a degree of bias because i work retail, i started this job as a cashier then when we shifted to self checkouts, my work downsized and i and some others got retrained on SCO and other coworkers got let go. were already staffed lean even tho it results in each of us running more SCO registers than we can manage, because the shrink of incorrectly rung items or stolen items, the shrink, is less than the cost of hiring enough of us to watch the registers without sprinting all the fuckin time. and if the SCOs improve enough (or they decide to outsource their "self" checkouts to countries with lower pay) i have zero doubt the company wouldnt hesitate to let me and my remaining coworkers go too
and what bothers me is that while theres occasionally some middle aged people saying they dont like self checkouts cuz they want us to keep our jobs, and im touched that theyre concerned about that, it frustrates me to no end that automation of service work has never been the kind of cultural zeitgeist that AI use in creative work is now
my coworkers who lost their jobs were no less impacted by the sudden lack of income. i am not less impacted by going from running one register to running 6-9 registers at a time (because they arent that reliable and i still have to run around troubleshooting)
and despite all that i still cant find myself getting mad at the self checkouts themselves because like, theyre very patently Not The Fucking Problem, the problem is that housing and food and medical are dangled over mine and everyone elses head, contingent on "earning" them despite us continually developing productive technology that by any reasonable measure should be reducing the amount of work needed
but even accounting for recency bias, i cannot believe that its just a case of the subject of the day. its frustrating as hell
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